


The Amazing Adventures of Wyatt and Traeger

by sahiya



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: Bromance, Gen, Huddling For Warmth, Platonic Cuddling, Schmoop, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-13
Updated: 2013-09-13
Packaged: 2017-12-26 10:36:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/964951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sahiya/pseuds/sahiya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Just like old times,” Chris said with a bright grin. “Traeger and Wyatt on the road again.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Amazing Adventures of Wyatt and Traeger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [toldthestars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/toldthestars/gifts).



> Thanks to Fuzzyboo for beta reading.

“Well, this is familiar,” Ben sighed. 

He let his briefcase fall to the floor as he took in the drab hotel room. It wasn’t actually dirty, which was something, but it was fairly depressing, especially with the dark gray light coming in the window. The snowstorm that’d chased him and Chris off the road wasn’t wasting any time in moving in. 

There was also only one bed. One bed, one very uncomfortable looking chair, and carpet that probably hadn’t been shampooed in longer than Ben had been alive. There was no way either he or Chris would agree to sleep on that, which meant they’d be getting awfully cozy. Which might not be a bad thing. Despite the heater he could hear clanking away, the room was remarkably chilly. 

“Just like old times,” Chris said with a bright grin. “Traeger and Wyatt on the road again.”

Ben grimaced. He’d really hoped to get home to Leslie before the storm hit. He and Chris had already had a long day, up at the crack of dawn to drive to Indianapolis for their meeting - well, Chris’s meeting. Ben honestly wasn’t sure what role he’d been intended to play, but Chris had insisted he come. He’d spent most of the meeting watching the weather and the clock. 

“We can make it!” Chris had said, cheerfully. “Never underestimate the power of positive thinking, Ben.”

“Over the weather?” Ben had muttered, eyeing the sky dubiously. 

Three hours later, Ben was unhappily vindicated. He’d been looking forward to being pleasantly snowed in with Leslie, not stranded in a dingy motel in the middle of nowhere. 

“You hungry?” Chris asked, when Ben didn’t say anything. 

“Uh, sure,” Ben said, even though he didn’t know what they were going to do about it. The motel didn’t have a restaurant, and Ben probably wouldn’t have eaten there even if it _had_. He did think he’d seen a vending machine with chips and cookies and crackers near the ice dispenser, but he knew from experience that Chris would go hungry before he poisoned himself with high fructose corn syrup ( _Made in Pawnee!_ ), artificial coloring, and preservatives. 

“I have some fruit and nut bars,” Chris said, dropping his own bag on the room’s single, beat-up table. “Also fruit leather and kale chips.”

 _Kale chips_. Ben didn’t make a face, but it was a close thing. “I’ll take a fruit and nut bar,” he said, and Chris flipped him one. 

It wasn’t too bad, actually, especially in the grand scheme of things that Chris had tried to get him to eat. It only tasted a little bit like cardboard, and the dried acai berries were actually kind of tasty. Ben nibbled at his fruit and nut bar and even ventured to try some of the kale chips once it was gone. 

By the time they were done with their impromptu picnic, the snow had started falling in earnest. It was accumulating rapidly on the sill, and when he looked outside he already couldn’t distinguish their car from any of the others. 

Ben didn’t say anything, but he thought the temperature of the room had fallen right along with the snow. It was coldest near the windows, but even right near the heater it wasn’t much better. He crouched down and fiddled around with it, but he couldn’t get it to put out much more heat. 

They played poker while the snow fell. Ben remembered doing this in towns all across Indiana. People had liked Chris more than they’d liked him, but not by much; a state auditor was still a state auditor, even if he was boyishly handsome and optimistic to the point of absurdity, and they were still there to gut city budgets with a metaphorical machete. Neither of them had been invited out much, so they’d spent a lot of evenings with only each other for company. It hadn’t been so bad, either, Ben thought. Chris had driven him crazy at first, but eventually, round about the third town or so, Ben had come to appreciate Chris’s own special brand of crazy. 

Most of the time. 

“Do you ever miss it?” Chris asked, around the sixth hand or so. 

Ben didn’t have to ask what Chris meant. “No,” he said, without any hesitation whatsoever. Chris had been just about the _only_ thing he’d enjoyed in those years. Looking back, he realized he’d been pretty miserable: stuck in a rut he wasn’t even aware of, doing something he hadn’t taken much pleasure in. “Do you?”

“How could I?” Chris said with a bright smile. “Pawnee is, after all, _lit_ erally the best town in America. Though I do wish it had a health food store. I have to drive to Snerling for my fruit and nut bars.”

“Yeah, good luck opening a health food store in Pawnee,” Ben said dryly. “Though you’d have a better chance with that than I do winning with this hand.” He folded, and Chris gathered up his small pile of dimes. 

Chris shook his head. “Still, it was an adventure. Hey, speaking of adventures,” he added, in a way that Ben thought was supposed to sound casual, “whatever happened to _The Amazing Adventures of Wyatt and Traeger_?”

Ben blinked. Way back when they’d been on the road all the time, he’d started drawing a comic strip - just for fun, of course, no one wanted to read a comic strip about a couple of state auditors. But he’d shown it to Chris, and from then on it’d become a running joke between them. “That’s one for _Wyatt and Traeger_ ,” one of them would say, whenever something weird happened to them. Somewhere along the way he’d stopped drawing it, too worn down by the job, he guessed, to see it as an adventure anymore. 

“I don’t know,” he said. “I know I didn’t throw them out. They must be in a box somewhere. Some of my stuff from Indianapolis still isn’t unpacked.” There hadn’t been any room for it when he was living with April and Andy, and there hadn’t been a lot of time since he and Leslie had moved in together. Chris nodded and dealt the next hand. 

Night had fallen by the time they gave up on poker. Ben braved the weather to get a soda from the vending machine and almost got lost on his way back, so disorientated by the wind and the snow - which was falling _sideways_ \- that he couldn’t tell one motel corridor from the next. 

“I think the pipes are frozen,” Chris said, when Ben finally staggered back in with his now half-frozen bottles of Sprite and water. 

“This is going to get cold, isn’t it?” Ben asked. The room felt warm now, after coming in from outside, but he knew it wasn’t. And it was likely to get colder as the night went on. 

“Well, we did say it’d be an adventure,” Chris said. “One for _Wyatt and Traeger_ , right?”

“Right,” Ben said with a grin he didn’t feel. 

They piled all the blankets from the closet on the bed, even leaving the comforter, unsanitary though it probably was. Neither of them had anything with them that was appropriate for staying overnight - that had never been the plan, after all - but they’d both dressed for cold, at least, and had layers on beneath their suits. 

The power went out just as they were climbing into bed. _Perfect_ , Ben thought, as the wall heater died along with it. The lights outside died, too, leaving only the glow of their cell phones on the bedside table for company. 

The bed was freezing at first, but it warmed up quickly, and Ben found himself glad, at least, that he wasn’t on his own. By mutual, unspoken agreement, the two of them had both scooted over into the middle of the bed, so that their shoulders were touching. Ben listened to the quiet rasp of Chris’s breath. Otherwise, the darkness and silence were both absolute. 

“Remember our first assignment?” Chris asked into the dark after a couple of minutes. 

Ben snorted. “I thought I’d kill you for sure by the time it was over.”

“I thought you might, too,” Chris said, and Ben could hear his grin, even if he couldn’t see it. 

“But it was . . . nice,” Ben said after a moment. “A lot more fun. I enjoyed the lack of death threats. And having someone to talk things over with at the end of the day.”

“Yeah,” Chris said, with what Ben thought was a wistful note in his voice. “I miss that.”

Ben frowned in the dark, where Chris couldn’t see him. He suddenly wondered if Chris had been entirely truthful when he’d said he didn’t miss the old days. Ben had Leslie now, but it’d been a while since Chris had had anyone. Put in that perspective, Chris dragging him along on this trip suddenly made a lot more sense. But Ben wasn’t sure what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything at all. 

Even though circumstances weren’t exactly ideal, Ben drifted off to sleep pretty quickly. He woke several times in the middle of the night to a freezing room. But the bed was warm, and if the two of them migrated closer and closer to the middle as the night went on, no one else ever had to know. And if Ben woke up with his arm slung around Chris’s waist and his nose smashed into Chris’s bicep, then it wasn’t any more awkward than some of other Wyatt and Traeger’s other adventures. 

Being at home with Leslie would’ve been ideal, but as things went, this could’ve been worse. Ben snorted quietly to himself and went back to sleep. 

When he woke again, it was morning. The heater was back on and so was the power, it seemed. Chris wasn’t there. The note by the bed read, _Went for a light 5k. Will get breakfast for us._

Ben rolled his eyes and went to start the coffee. He supposed that Chris was showing restraint by only going for a 5k, which wasn’t all that long by his standards. Still, it was 5k _in the snow_. 

Chris came back ten minutes later, flushed red with cold but obnoxiously chipper, whole grain bagels and low-fat cream cheese in hand. The roads were plowed, he said, and once they reached the interstate it should be smooth sailing. Ben texted Leslie to let her know they were on their way and pushed a paper cup of crappy motel-room coffee into Chris’s hand as he pushed them both out the door. 

Chris kept up a steady stream of chatter all the way back to Pawnee. Ben nodded in the right places and spoke when Chris asked him a direct question, but that was about it. He wanted to get home to Leslie, but more than that, it gnawed at him what Chris had said the night before. Ben hadn’t meant to let his relationship with Leslie affect his friendship with Chris, and God knew Chris never complained. But they weren’t on the road anymore, and when Ben needed to talk to someone at the end of the day, he talked to Leslie. 

He didn’t say anything about it until he pulled up in front of Chris’s house to drop him off. The driveway was unplowed, of course, so Ben idled in the street while Chris grabbed his briefcase out of the backseat. “Hey,” he said, just as Chris was about to wave goodbye and go inside. “I was thinking - I really should dig up those old _Adventures of Wyatt and Traeger_. They were good, weren’t they?”

“Yeah,” Chris said, smiling. “They were.”

“And I was also thinking,” Ben added, “that maybe I should start them up again. I mean, I have the time now. There’s a lot of them I never wrote, and I bet we could come up with some new ones, too.”

“Really?” Chris said, raising his eyebrows. “You wouldn’t rather write the adventures of Knope and Wyatt?” To his credit, he didn’t sound bitter or passive-aggressive, merely curious. Still, now that Ben could hear what he wasn’t saying, he wondered how he’d ever missed it. 

Ben shook his head. “There’s room for both,” he said, firmly. “I’ll make sure of it.”

_Fin._


End file.
